Persistence of the landscape in the painting of Víctor Julio González

Víctor Julio González (1961), is a Venezuelan artist with a long career, trained in two of the most recognized art schools in his country, between 1982 and 1987, we refer to the Escuela de Artes Plásticas Arturo Michelena, in Valencia, and the Escuela de Artes Visuales Cristóbal Rojas, in Caracas. Although painting is his main occupation, he also does photography and videos for artistic purposes, media with which, on occasions, he has complemented his exhibition proposals; he is even currently rehearsing the fusion between photography and painting. Soon we will see the results.

Víctor Julio became interested in the world of art at a very early age, thanks to the fact that, since then, he has been characterized by being very observant, particularly of nature, the jungle, and its fauna. He has been a traveler since he was a child, when he began to travel a lot with his parents from one city to another, trips in which he became absorbed in looking at the landscape that appeared to him on the sides of the road during his long journey, a practice that he still maintains, being in permanent movement, coming and going, traveling and carefully observing the landscape, an experience that has been very useful for him to conceptualize and develop his landscape work, specifically, although he has worked on other themes, such as grotesque human faces, for example, in an expressionist style, products of the ghosts of his dreams, a series with which in 1998 he won the Grand Prize XXIII Salón Nacional de Arte Aragua, Maracay, Venezuela.

Víctor Julio has been interested in many classical, modern and contemporary artists, but he has experienced a great attraction for the traveling artists of the 19th century, especially Ferdinand Bellerman, a German painter and naturalist, who worked, between 1842 and 1845, alongside of his compatriot Humboldt in his travels of scientific exploration through the Venezuelan geography, painting, drawing and describing the landscape, plants, animals and customs of the inhabitants of this geography.

Víctor Julio takes Bellerman's landscape painting as inspiration for his work, since he has felt very identified with the work of this German artist, whom he has reinterpreted and honored. He explains that from the first moment his paintings activated his childhood memories, transporting to his memory images of the landscape and sunsets of Acarigua, a place where he used to travel with his parents to visit his grandmother, whom he usually mentions whenever he refers to his childhood. This is the substratum that nourishes his landscape work, his jungle landscapes, a recurring theme in his visual discourse; but Víctor Julio does it in a way that is reminiscent of the aesthetics of the new landscape, not with a descriptive, narrative intention, or from a romantic, idealized, and stylized vision as Bellerman did.

The new landscape is an artistic trend that emerged in Venezuela in the late 1960s and early 1970s, after social realism, geometric abstraction and informalism, between 1940 and 1950, questioned and displaced the aesthetics of landscape founded and developed by El Circulo de Bellas Artes and the Escuela de Caracas ─which predominated in national visual arts for almost three decades─ for considering landscape a worn-out genre, of no interest to artists, critics and collectors.

The artists of the new landscape were interested in taking up this genre as a theme in national painting, but they did so by breaking with the aesthetic models of the traditional landscape represented by the Círculo de Bellas Artes and the Escuela de Caracas. The neo-landscapers proceed to replace the way of seeing nature. The landscape returns to the artistic scene, but this time it reappears resized, approached from a new perspective, reconsidered from a freer, more spontaneous perspective; that is to say, they work the landscape with the language of contemporary aesthetics, which is characterized by being multiple, fragmented, suggestive, connotative, rather than narrative. They assume the landscape with reflection and a critical sense, with ecological, social, and psychological interest, observed from within, from memory, as is the case of Víctor Julio, who from Bellerman's landscapes, which activate his memory, reinvents the landscapes of his reminiscences, where he combines memories, reality, dreams, and fantasy.

Ideas spring up for this artist in the constant trips that he still usually makes, in which he takes photographs and takes notes of those aspects of the landscape that attract him, such as leaves, branches, trunks, vines, flowers, sky, clouds, fog, luminosity, color, texture, the transience of images, among other situations that occur in a natural setting under his perception. When facing the blank canvas, Víctor Julio transfers that repertoire of images transfigured into exuberant foliage with dense or subtle atmospheres, veils, and transparencies with which he achieves distance or closeness. Although his landscapes always appear in the foreground.

He likes to proceed facing the canvas in an unpredictable way, sometimes he works by superimposing many layers of paint with a certain ease and gesture, to achieve textures, fillings; and other times he works thin, subtle layers, in which the skin of the support, the pores of the canvas, can be seen as one more element of visual expression. In some cases, the landscape is more detailed, without reaching the descriptive and stylized level of Bellermann; and in others, it becomes a bit more abstract and expressive.

As we have seen, the landscape is a recurring theme in the visual production of Víctor Julio, in whose continuity there are always variations, innovative visual aspects appear, a genre in which he still sees creative possibilities from the technical, formal and conceptual points of view; however, he thinks that at some point that source may run out on him and then he wouldn’t be able to continue working on the landscape, but we know that like any creator he will always find another source of inspiration that will allow him to display his great capacity for imagination and visual creation.